White label mortgage platform in dozens of integrations
Objectively speaking, BeSmartee has an unusual name.
The California-based fintech company revolves around a white label digital mortgage platform for banks, credit unions and non-bank lending institutions. Its name is inspired by Dennis the Menace – a daily syndicated newspaper comic strip, TV show, cartoon and film series about an innovative and rebellious child and Mr. Wilson, his stodgy neighbor and rival.
Tim Nguyen (pictured), BeSmartee’s co-founder and CEO, grew up watching the TV show, and said the dynamic hit home with him. For him, Mr. Wilson reflected mortgage brokers and lenders doing business the old way, with frustration and disorganization. Dennis, on the other hand, represented new blood and a different way of looking at the world.
“To look at them as a mortgage broker and lender, we wanted to be like Dennis. We didn’t want to be like Mr. Wilson. We wanted to be a “smarty-pants”, to challenge the way the industry norm was. We wanted to BeSmartee,” Nguyen explained.
White label
BeSmartee was initially founded in 2006 but the mortgage crisis ended up delaying its launch at that time. Its principal founders exited their subsequent mortgage lending and technology businesses and resumed BeSmartee’s development in 2014 before going live in early 2016. (Nguyen, for example, founded and ran InHouse in 2002 before selling it in 2014.)
Read more: Alliance illustrates growth of 'consumer-permissioned data' growth
Clients using the white label platform customize the look, colors and other details to match their own company identity.
White label platforms are becoming more common these days. They include Vontive, which recently raised $135 million in venture capital to fund the rollout of its white label embedded mortgage platform for investment real estate. SimpleNexus (now owned by nCino) is another example, a white label homeownership platform designed for borrowers to use on their mobile phones. Technology giant Black Knight also offers white label platform technology for its customers, among many others.
Nguyen argued that his company’s platform allows customers to adopt BeSmartee’s technology in a broader and deeper way.
“It simply allows the customers – lenders in this case – to really make it look like it’s their own,” Nguyen said. “We also have about 1,000 points of configuration, so their workflows and process, the automation they’re looking to unlock, the experience they’re looking to deliver – it’s completely configurable.”
According to Nguyen, the company stands out because it tries to automate everything for its lender customers, including data processes.
“We take it beyond just an application into credit, product and pricing, automating underwriting, initial disclosures, appraisal payments,” Nguyen said. “We simply automate much more in a shorter period of time.”
Additionally, the company’s platform has integrated with software and data providers and other systems its mortgage lenders use.
“We weave them all and merge them all together,” Nguyen said. He compares the process to making music, weaving the vendors together in a certain way that enhances the lender and consumer experience.
Integrations
BeSmartee has more than 165 integrations in play with its lenders, covering areas including Loan Origination Systems, CRMs and pricing, according to the company’s website.
The company integrates with its clients primarily by using APIs, along with some SDK (software development kit) integrations and third-party integration.
“It’s just our system talking to another and another and another, all together and within our one platform,” Nguyen said.
Read next: Case study: SimpleNexus carries on with new owner
For interested customers, the integration journey starts with a discovery process, to explore the potential client’s technology, how and whether it is configurable, and what the client wants to accomplish.
“Once we get to that deep level of understanding and agreement, then it is about configuring and customizing the software,” Nguyen said.
“There are lots of ways to configure the system just by flipping things on and off in certain combinations. There could also be an element of customization,” he noted, with tweaks and tinkering that help match BeSmartee’s platform to the way a client does business.
After that, the third and final step involves user acceptance testing, to make sure end users buy into the design and delivery.
“We’re going to make sure we get that buy-in,” Nguyen noted. “And then we roll it out to customers [and their] consumers and we hold their hand in the first three months. We want to make sure that the adoption is correct.”
According to Nguyen, implementation can take place in as little as seven days. In at least one case it took two years, but that was for a massive client with multiple systems in a project involving a wide scope.
On average, he said, the process takes between 90 and 120 days.
Scalable growth
Moving ahead, the company is focusing on starting to scale its business and preparing for the longer term.
“These last four months we focused on the entire management team, refining processes and controls, basically getting ready to scale,” Nguyen said. “We want to get into the hands of as many people as possible so they can benefit.”
Expansion will involve scalable growth, he said, where the company focuses on “taking the baby steps” needed and doing it “the right way.”
